The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion

Introduction

INTRODUCTION It hardly seems to bear remarking that sentimental literature of the American nineteenth century is steeped in Christian piety. As anyone acquainted with this female-centered literary aesthetic well knows, sentimental novels and poems routinely depict religious faith as a balm to the restless spirit and a beneficent influence on unruly behavior. Countless sentimental texts contain scenes of devout prayer, ardent hymn singing, and religious instruction. Heart-rending deathbed scenes and leave-takings are softened by promises of reunion in the afterlife, and Bibles and hymnals serve as the premier tokens of affection or goodwill. To readers today, sentimental piety may seem colorless or indistinct. Prayer, Bible reading, and the pursuit of self-betterment are the principal requirements of Christian observance in sentimental literature; in contrast with the teachings of Calvinism or Catholicism, salvation in sentimental literature seems to be available to anyone with faith, with neither ritual nor conversion required. Without the delimiting contours of these conventional features of Christian observance, sentimental piety appears to be denominationally impartial and untouched by doctrinal specifics. Early scholarship registered this perception, as with Ann Douglas’s foundational study of sentimental literature , The Feminization of American Culture (1977). In that work, Douglas interpreted the absence of Calvinist rigor in sentimentalism as evidence of a general lack of theological substance, and she characterized sentimental piety as “peculiarly unassertive and retiring.”1 David S. Reynolds similarly described the religious life portrayed in sentimental literature as “determinedly nonintellectual and plain.”2 In response to the perception of sentimentalism as theologically vacant, Jane Tompkins offered a spirited defense of sentimental piety in Sensational Designs (1985), in which she documented the influence of religious typologies of sacrifice and renewal on sentimental narratives, as with her analysis of the death of Eva St. Clare in Harriet Beecher 2 Introduction Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Tompkins argued that sentimentalism was not devoid of content, and she showed instead how the sentimental constitution of Christianity was poised to effect social change and impart authority to those on the social periphery, such as children, slaves, and widows.3 This book seeks to build on this foundational work by analyzing both the religious beliefs inherent in sentimental literature and the social implications of these religious allegiances. Such scholars as Nina Baym, Dawn Coleman, Tracy Fessenden, Sharon Kim, and Abram Van Engen have continued the work begun by Jane Tompkins by cataloging the religious contents of sentimental piety, and this project likewise aspires to unearth and historicize some of the beliefs intrinsic to sentimental literature that are often imperceptible to modern eyes, either by deliberate authorial calculation or by the historical erasures that inevitably occur with the passage of time.4 To that end, this book takes as its starting point the constraints of Tompkins’s own terminology in describing sentimental piety, which she broadly categorized as “Christian,” a general term the precise definition of which was very much in dispute in the nineteenth century. This study seeks to provide greater denominational specificity to our understanding of the religious contents of sentimental literature to show that the seemingly general, broad Christianity at the center of these texts was in fact a highly sectarian, partisan configuration born out of contemporary religious developments. Concentrated analysis of the doctrinal, sectarian specifics of sentimental literature reveals the insufficiency of the binary nature of the “Douglas-Tompkins debate,” as Laura Wexler termed it, which alternately characterized sentimental piety as repressive or emancipatory.5 As this study aims to show, the richly textured and complex nature of sentimental piety renders it resistant to such clear-cut classifications. In some instances, sentimental writers promoted doctrines that afforded new religious authority to select constituencies, but, in so doing, they contributed to the further marginalization of already vulnerable social groups. In other instances, sentimental writers endorsed populist religious movements, but their approbation worked above all else to fortify their own burgeoning religious authority. Moreover, in the dense and contentious religious climate of the mid-nineteenth century, all public avowals of religious belief functioned both as sectarian affirmations and as renunciations , implicitly set in opposition to other competing religious groups, and so sentimental piety, with its varied and complex array of constituent features, was inevitably enmeshed in numerous religious alliances and rivalries . While this positioning was sometimes inadvertent, in innumerable cases 3 Introduction sentimental writers placed their own religious beliefs in direct opposition to others they depicted as questionable...